Harry Reid appoints senators to debt reduction committee

By Karoun Demirjian

Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2011 | 5:03 p.m.

Sen. Harry Reid made three deficit reduction committee appointments Tuesday. Sens. Max Baucus, John Kerry and Patty Murray will represent Senate Democrats on the bipartisan panel.

Most of the debt package Congress passed last week rides on the ability of lawmakers on the 12-member committee to come up with a package of cuts both the House and Senate can agree on. If they can’t, sizable cuts in military spending and to Medicare providers kick in automatically come Thanksgiving.

“I have appointed three senators who each possess an expertise in budget matters, a commitment to a balanced approach and a track record of forging bipartisan consensus,” Reid said in a statement.

Murray will be co-chairwoman. She is the only member of the Senate Democrats’ leadership team to get the nod; she is also the group’s chief election strategist heading into 2012.

Murray has been in the Senate since the early 1990s and has served on the Senate Budget and Appropriations committees.

But the fact that she will lead this committee, with whomever House Speaker John Boehner appoints as her counterpart in the next few days, reveals how inextricably linked this whole process is with the coming election. Democrats will defend 23 Senate seats, more than a quarter of which are toss-ups, but Reid can only stand to lose two or three if he wants to retain his leadership position.

Baucus’ name is predictable. He and Reid don’t always agree on sweeping matters of policy — two years ago, they split severely over the inclusion of a public option in the health care law — but he’s a perennial figure in matters of fiscal policy.

Baucus leads the Financial Services committee, and either he or it (or both) has been at center-stage throughout practically every major policy fight of President Barack Obama’s presidency.

Kerry’s appointment, however, is unexpected. He stole the limelight in the days before the debt-ceiling deadline by ridiculing House Republicans for wanting to send a “dramatic, stupid message of incompetence to the world” by insisting on Boehner’s balanced budget amendment-based version of the bill.

And although Kerry has long been the Senate’s go-to-guy for foreign policy and is a career negotiator, he’s never been a featured face when it comes to the country’s foreign debt. Given how much of this crisis binds the U.S. to foreign nations — more than 40 percent of every dollar we spend is borrowed from abroad — there’s an argument to be made for his presence. According to Politico, Kerry is reported to have lobbied Reid hard for the nod.

When sizing up the roster, it’s also important to note who Reid didn’t include: no one from the Gang of Six. They were the six senators — three Republicans and three Democrats — who came up with the $4 trillion “grand bargain” deal that lowered the overall top tax rate, closed tax loopholes, raised revenue and ended the Bush tax cuts for millionaires (a much higher income floor than the $250,000 threshold Democrats have sought).

Although the White House took an interest in the deal, Reid didn’t receive it too warmly and hasn’t spoken terribly highly of it since.

Democrats need the committee to produce something they can help pass to save political face. But many Senate Democrats have also noted that absent political failure, the alternative to a debt compromise isn’t such a bad deal.

“We’re not too concerned, as we were with the debt ceiling, that if we don’t reach an agreement it will be devastating to our priorities,” said Sen. Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland, after the debt ceiling package vote. “We protected our priorities. We protected Social Security, we protected Medicare beneficiaries ... so we go into these negotiations in a pretty strong position as it relates to what comes out of the Joint Committee.”

Conceivably, if everyone from Obama to the credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s, which downgraded the United States’ creditworthiness on Friday, agrees that a compromise must include ways to increase revenue and to cut federal spending, any compromise with Republicans is going to be a worse deal for Democrats than the worst-case-scenario cuts.

Worthy of note also about Baucus, Kerry and Murray is where the states they represent fall on the national economic spectrum. Everyone will be talking about jobs, jobs, jobs as collateral in deficit reduction, whether through cuts or taxes. Those messages carry especially potent force in Nevada, where unemployment is at 12.4 percent.

Montana and Massachusetts — Baucus and Kerry’s home states — each enjoys a fairly healthy job market compared with the nation. Each has about a 7.5 percent unemployment rate. Washington state’s, at 9.2 percent, is about on par with the national rate.